This book, which is thematically linked with Humanism and Terror, marks another of Merleau-Ponty’s attempts to come to grips with Marxism. Adventures presents reflections on the struggle between the proletariat and the Party for a valid revolutionary praxis. The question for Merleau-Ponty is, are we to conceive the revolution as a spontaneous, necessary uprising of the proletariat, in which case the Party is superfluous; or is the proletariat the tool of the Party, in which case the Party is superior and (...) the proletariat is reduced to an instrument which does not know its own purpose. The first half of the book is Merleau-Ponty’s reading of classic Marxist attempts to come to grips with this question, including discussions of the early Lukács, Lenin, and Trotsky. The reading is not intended to be a rigorous historical account but rather a philosophical interpretation culminating in the recognition that if either the Party or the proletariat become supreme then the dialectic, which is so central to all Marxist thought, is lost. (shrink)

This book, originally published in Germany in 1951 under the title Menschlichkeit, is a religious reading of human nature culminating in the assertion that, "The ultimate meaning of man can belong only to his relationship to the absolute, the relation which he has to God." Inspired by Fichte, and emphasizing the unity of Kant’s three critiques which together address the "lived" human experience, the author attempts to address the "whole" man, not only his intellect, his objectivity or his historicity. This (...) concern with the "whole" man leads him, within the context of a critique of Husserl, to assert the limitations of science, "Scientific knowledge seeks objectivity;... [But] objectivity offers no ultimately valid truth." When we have moved beyond science and objectivity Medicus "invites" us to seek the "unconditionally true" by pursuing the good, the beautiful, and the just. These eternal values rise from the depths of man’s being, "bringing him the awareness that he must make decisions by means of which he will be enabled to escape the contingency of changing circumstances and the power of time." Medicus devotes considerable effort to rejecting Nietzsche on the grounds that his glorification of man actually cuts us off from these inner roots and finally sets us in opposition to our own "creatureliness." The book is characterized by an eclectic pedantry that proceeds not so much by argument and analysis as by quotation cliche and assertion.—S.L.W. (shrink)

This wide-ranging collection of recent addresses and essays, collected in 1968, is published together with "Conversations between Paul Ricoeur and Gabriel Marcel," which appeared in the same year. Tragic Wisdom contains fourteen essays all loosely connected about "The Questioning of Being," originally presented to the Société française de philosophie in 1958. Peripheral essays, which Marcel likens to currents crisscrossing a magnetic field, explore philosophy, humanism, truth, freedom, life, death, evil, atheism, philosophical passion, and tragic wisdom. Throughout there is an effort (...) to address the question of being and its relationship to "the concrete situation of man today" in a manner surprisingly similar to that of the later Heidegger. The influence of Nietzsche,, and of Heidegger, illuminate a facet of Marcel’s ongoing philosophic quest which has heretofore lain undetected within his Christianity. (shrink)